The four bombings in Saudi Arabia last week, which killed dozens, including 10
Americans, are symptomatic of a deep fissure in that country. The argument is
over religion, politics and foreignersand it goes back a long way. The West
must react by helping the Saudi family win this dispute, while putting pressure
on it to reform.

Saudi Arabia's origins lie in the mid-eighteenth century, when a tribal leader
named Muhammad Al Saud joined forces with a religious leader named Muhammad
bin Abd al-Wahhab. The first gave his name to the kingdom that (with the exception
of two interim periods) still exists; the second gave his name to the version
of Islam that still serves as the kingdom's ideology.

On first appearance, the Wahhabi version of Islam was seen as wildly extreme
and was widely repudiated. Its fanatical enmity toward other Muslims and its
rejection of long-standing Muslim customs made it anathema, for example, to
the Ottoman rulers who dominated the Middle East. The Saudi kingdom disappeared
twice because its military and religious aggressiveness made it so loathsome
to its neighbors.

The current iteration of the Saudi kingdom came into being in 1902 when a Saudi
leader captured Riyadh. Ten years later, there emerged a Wahhabi armed force
known as the Ikhwan (Arabic for "Brethren") which in its personal
practices and its hostility toward non-Wahhabis represented the most militant
dimension of this already militant movement. One war cry of theirs went: "The
winds of Paradise are blowing. Where are you who hanker after Paradise?"

The Ikhwan served the Saudi family well, bringing it one military victory after
another. A key turning point came in 1924, when the father of today's Saudi
king captured Mecca from the great-great-grandfather of today's Jordanian king.
This victory had two major implications. It vanquished the last remaining rival
of the Saudis and established the family as the leading force on the Arabian
peninsula. And it brought under Saudi control not just another town but the
holiest city of Islam and a cosmopolitan urban area that hosted divergent interpretations
of Islam.

These changes turned the Saudi insurgency into a state and brought a desert
movement to the city. This meant the Saudi monarch could no longer give the
Ikhwan and the traditional Wahhabi interpretation of Islam free reign, but had
to control it. The result was a civil war in the late 1920s which ended in the
monarchy's victory over the Ikhwan in 1930.

In other words, the less fanatical version of Wahhabism triumphed over the
more fanatical. The Saudi monarchs presided over a kingdom extreme by comparison
with other Muslim countries but tame by Wahhabi standards.

Yes, the Saudi state deems the Koran to be its constitution, forbids the practice
of any religion but Islam on its territory, employs an intolerant religious
police, and imposes gender apartheid. But it also enacts non-Koranic regulations,
employs large numbers of non-Muslims, constrains the religious police, and allows
women to attend school and work.

The Ikhwan may have lost the fight in 1930, but its way of thinking lived on,
representing the main opposition to an ever-more grandiose and corrupt Saudi
state. The potency of this alternative became startlingly evident in 1979, when
an Ikhwan-inspired group violently seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. On a larger
scale, the Ikhwan spirit dominated jihad efforts against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan during the 1980s. And the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan
in the period 1996-2001 embodied the Ikhwan in power.

Osama bin Laden, a Saudi who spent formative years in Afghanistan, is the leading
representative of the Ikhwan movement today. He wants to depose the corrupt
and hypocritical Saudi monarchy, install a Taliban-like government, evict non-Muslim
foreigners, and return women to the harem. His vision has real appeal in Saudi
Arabia; it's widely reported that in a fair election, he would handily defeat
the current ruler, King Fahd.

Thus, the recent violence in Riyadh ultimately reflects not just a hatred of
Americans but a titanic clash of visions and a struggle for power; in this,
it recapitulates the civil war of the 1920s. Is Saudi Arabia to remain a monarchy
that at least partially accommodates modernity and the outside world? Or is
it to become the Islamic Emirate of Arabia, a reincarnation of the Taliban's
completely regressive rule in Afghanistan?

For the outside world, the choice is clear; however unattractive, the Saudi
monarchy is preferable to the yet worse Ikhwan alternative. This implies a two-step
approach: help the monarchy defeat its Ikhwan-inspired enemy and put serious
pressure on the kingdom to reform everything from its school system to its sponsorship
of Wahhabi organizations abroad.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared in the New York Post.

More Comments:

Josh Greenland -
5/25/2003

The knowledge one needs to fact-check the current Saudi Arabia essay is much more esoteric than that necessary for checking the Iraq one. How do we know that the current essay isn't full of errors like the other one was?

Frank Lee -
5/20/2003

Pipes wants to hope and pray, not just blindly hate and incite.
Maybe he's had an off-day.